The competitive intelligence team has a staff of 25, including one former CIA analyst, and operates from one of the non-descript Koch network offices clustered near the Courthouse metro stop in suburban Arlington, Va. It has provided network officials with documents detailing confidential voter-mobilization plans by major Democrat-aligned groups. It also sends regular "intelligence briefing" emails tracking the canvassing, phone-banking and voter-registration efforts of labor unions, environmental groups and their allies, according to documents reviewed by POLITICO and interviews with a half-dozen sources with knowledge of the group. The competitive intelligence team has gathered on-the-ground intelligence from liberal groups' canvassing events in an effort to assess the technology and techniques of field efforts to boost Democrats, according to the sources. And they say the team utilizes high-tech tactics to track the movements of liberal organizers, including culling geo-data embedded in their social media posts.

Well, isn't this special? Wasn't just a few weeks ago that Squint and the Meat Puppet were assuring us that Charles and David were their brand-new besties and applying to them a lavish lingual lavage? Now, we find that they are pretty much the ratfcking plutocrats we all knew they were. And more than a little paranoid on top of it.

In addition to delving into the left, the competitive intelligence team also monitors potential Koch network threats, according to sources familiar with it. It tracks people deemed suspicious outside the offices of Koch network groups, circulating be-on-the-lookout photos to internal network email lists, while keeping an eye on the network's own ranks for possible leakers or disloyal employees.

One former network executive remembers an email containing a photo of a man identified as an operative with the environmental group Greenpeace who allegedly had been spotted taking his own photos outside the network's cluster of offices in the Courthouse neighborhood of Arlington…In another instance, sources say, Roman's team set out to identify an IT contractor who was working for one of the network's groups and was posting anonymous messages to Reddit, proclaiming that he worked for the Koch brothers but despised their stances. Within 48 hours, the team had sleuthed out the offender and his contract was terminated.

One hopes it was only the employee's contract that was terminated.

There's a healthy dose of both-siderism in the report, but the report also makes it pretty clear that what the Kochs are up to here is above and beyond the capabilities—and the goals—of any corresponding progressive operation. And I don't believe for a moment that there aren't other, seedier things going on in the shadows with these guys. Anyway, in case you're wondering how things turned out that way in 2016, you should probably keep a copy of this report handy.

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